American Realist Paintings

A still life of an ushanka, a type of hat with ear covers. Personett's textured fur and wood table invites the viewers to feel as if they are in the painting. The frayed edges of the strings of the hat suggests this is a well-worn garment, loved for many years. Signed "Personett" lower right corner. Framed in a traditional black frame w gold trim. Framed dimensions: 17 x 15 inches Rachel Personett was born in Hawaii, but raised in Colorado. Being the daughter of a pilot she has always traveled extensively. She has studied part time at the Savannah College of Art and Design, The Angel Academy of Art, and finally settled on the Florence Academy of Art, graduating in 2015. In January 2016 she apprenticed the painter Odd Nerdrum in Norway for eight months. Rachel Personett works strictly from life, and enjoys the challenged of painting the ephemeral. Working from life provides the opportunity to travel around the world painting the ever changing people and landscapes. Artist Statement My mother had studied advertising in college, so she knew a lot about arts and good craftsmanship. She did talks at my elementary school each week and on a different artist. I remember being very moved by the images of Van Gogh and Andrew Wyeth. At the Florence Academy I really liked Sargent, Sorolla, Willard Metcalf, Henri Fantin-Latour and Velazquez. At Odd Nerdrums I gained new respect for Rembrandt and was introduced to other Scandinavian painters like Edward Munch...

Nature is my muse. Animals are losing their habitat and they are, at the very least, confronted by or threatened by all of our discards. Though the birds in my paintings are not vict...

Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subj...

Born in Spokane, WA (1986), Tamalin Soleil Baumgarten paints quiet landscape scenes with a tonal, melancholic realism. She received her MFA from New York Academy of Art in 2015 and h...

A dark, yet crisp tromp-l'oeil depiction of a spatula. Morfis makes beauty out of the ordinary objects that we use everyday. Beacuse of varnish, the painting is difficult to photograph. The navy color is dark, but brightens with a spotlight on the painting. Framed in a modern black wood frame. Signed "J.Morfis" lower left ARTIST BIO John Morfis was born in Glen Cove, Long Island in 1976. His humble beginnings made pursuing a career in art difficult and paradoxically necessary. Fixated on making things aesthetically pleasing, John made an extreme departure from his family life when he chose to base his life on art. Surrounded by mechanics, welders, and otherwise trade workers John had a tough time expressing his interest in a world much more utilitarian and much less expressive and impractical. With an extraordinary desire to be an artist and a grant awarded, John was able to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting from the University of Hartford in 1998. While there John studied oil painting under American realist Stephen Brown...

Realism as a style has basically remained unchanged since the Renaissance. Realism as a technique, however, has definitely been altered and heavily influenced by technology. Most art...

Gary Faigin says of Kurt Solmssen’s work, “Though a realist, Kurt Solmssen does not so much record what he sees, as use his surroundings as a point of departure for poetic homages to...

Scott Duce Biography American, b. 1956 Scott Duce is an international artist working in New York. Duce’s work is included in many corporate, museum, and private collections. Notable...

"Little Girl and Dog on Shovel" is a blue, white and red trompe l'oeil oil painting of a child's beach shovel. An antique from the Ohio Art Company, which ...

Oil on Canvas This painting was selected for the cover of the catalog for the 2019 Gregory Frux solo exhibition "Brooklyn Plein Air"

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from the front seat of a car lo...

Awards 2013 Loring W. Coleman Award for Watercolor/ Allied Artists of America, 100th Annual Exhibition at the National Arts Club 2011 Mary Bryan Memorial Medal / Allied Arti...

"Pansies and Spilled Dirt" is an oil painting of purple and white pansies in a rustic brown pot. Dirt spilled onto the clean white surface below. Painting dimensions: 16 x 12 inches Framed dimensions: 18.5 x 14.5 inches Matthew Weigle...

Framed dimensions: 36.5" h x 28.5' w x 5.75' d Sight size: 25.5' h x 17.5' w Signature: bottom right Early 20th century still life, original gilt frame, original stretcher. The following excerpt was written and submitted by Gary R. Libby from an essay in his book Reflections: Paintings of Florida 1835-2000. Very little is currently known about the still-life painter, George W. Seavey. Maybelle Mann’s Art in Florida, 1999, suggests that Seavey came to St. Augustine in 1883, the year of financier and hotel magnate “Henry Flagler...

Oil on canvas STATEMENT by AUDREY ANASTASI: Considering myself primarily a feminist artist, painting other women, most of my work focuses on the human face, figures, animals and natu...

Ron Rizk’s paintings depict the intimate personal history of locales from his life. Ethereal and yet grounded in reality, the paintings tell the stories of very real places as seen ...

This painting features two children with big brown eyes peeking behind red-slatted shutters. The innocence on their faces contrasts with some sense of embarrassment, like if they had...

This compelling fine art painting presents a rural above-ground pool, enclosed by a makeshift chain-link fence, set against a sunlit landscape of rolling green grass and dense tree l...

George Kovach (b. 1942) Medium: Oil on Canvas Dimensions: 24" x 36" Markings: Signed lower right Frame size - 32.5 x 44.5"

Realism as a style has basically remained unchanged since the Renaissance. Realism as a technique, however, has definitely been altered and heavily influenced by technology. Most artists have given up “eyeballing” a subject as a drawing technique and have come to rely on photographs instead. Turnaround time for photographs is now virtually instant because of digital cameras...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

Self portrait of the artist as a monk. American, b. 1927 Artist Michael Aviano has been drawing since childhood. His first oil paintings were done when he was in junior high school. In the 1940’s Michael applied to the Art Students League, NYC, where the school director, Steward Klonis, was so impressed by his talent that he immediately enrolled him in Frank J. Reilly’s painting class. This was an honor, as it often took up to two years to gain entrance into Reilly’s classes. Frank J. Reilly studied with the famous League teacher, Frank Vincent Dumond (American 1865-1951), who in turn studied under Benjamin Constant (1845-1902), Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) and Gustave Boulanger (1824-1888), important painters of the French Academic Tradition. During his years at the Art Students League, Michael received annual scholarships and awards for his excellence in painting. Michael Aviano began exhibiting his work in New York in the 1960’s and built a reputation as an outstanding portrait and still life painter. The 1970’s brought Michael to Grand Central Art Galleries, NYC , the country’s premier gallery of American Realism. There his work was shown alongside such masters as Emil Carlsen, John Singer Sargent, George Innes, William Merritt Chase and such contemporaries as David Leffel, Richard Schmid, Charles Pfahl, and Priscilla Roberts...

Having spent many years as a photographer, Matt Condron is trained to recognize the importance of a moment or the preciousness of a fleeting opportunity. He is captivated by the idea of emptiness, as both a suggestion of solitude and as a state rife with the possibility of change and fulfillment. As a painter, he seeks out familiar, evocative scenes and concentrates on capturing the stillness of an empty room or vacant chair. His paintings can be seen as solitary, or as simply aberrant pauses between moments of frantic activity. The works are imbued with a quality of light that brings simple, content-rich objects into sharp focus. Condron attempts to establish not so much a connection to a chair or a room, but the feeling created by the wide embrace of emptiness. Ultimately, Condron creates scenes - part representation of real places, part invention from deep in his mind. The openness of his works invites the viewer to share the moment of quiet with him. By choosing places that seem to have been abruptly vacated, he attempts to awaken a connection to the moment before, or to the quietude he preserves inside himself in the form of memories. Matt Condron was born in 1967 in Simi Valley...

Ron Rizk’s paintings depict the intimate personal history of locales from his life. Ethereal and yet grounded in reality, the paintings tell the stories of very real places as seen ...

Dr. Rowland S. Russell PhD. writes about his experience directly witnessing Greg's practice as a “plein air” artist: Whether he’s portraying quiet scenes from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park or the Botanical Gardens, intriguing remnants of New York’s varied industry (grain silos...

"City Gates, Fez" is a plein air painting of ppl at the edge of a village in Morocco. Framed Dimensions: 14 x 18 inches Marc Dalessio was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, California. E...

In his current series, “In Your Room”, Alex Blas explores modern day life by examining the private spaces of his friends. In these paintings, Blas carefully considers the shadows, co...

Bumpei Usui Backyard, Staten Island, 1933 Signed lower right Oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches Provenance: The artist's estate Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New...

Ernest Fiene (1894 - 1965) Low Tide at Noon, Wellfleet, Massachusetts Oil on canvas 26 x 36 inches Signed lower right Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1894. As a teenager, Fiene immigrated to the United States in 1912. He studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1914 to 1918, taking day classes with Thomas Maynard and evening classes with Leon Kroll. Fiene continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Paris from 1916 to 1918, adding classes in printmaking at the Art Students League in 1923. Fiene began his career as an artist in 1919 with his first exhibition of watercolors at the MacDowell Club arranged by his mentor Robert Henri. In 1923 the Whitney Studio Club mounted a large exhibition of his works. The following year he had an exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, which completely sold out all fifty-two works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. With the proceeds of sales from the New Gallery exhibition, Ernest Fiene and his younger brother Paul, a sculptor, built studios in Woodstock, New York in 1925. In the early Twenties Ernest Fiene painted mostly landscapes of Woodstock and both the Ramapo and Hudson River Valleys. He was the subject of the first monograph for the Younger Artists Series in 1922. Published in Woodstock, the series went on to include Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The book reproduced 1 illustration in color and another 27 reproductions in black and white. Around 1925 Fiene became fascinated with the intensity, excitement, and opportunities for color harmonies New York City offered as a subject. His paintings shifted to urban and industrial themes with architecture, industry, and transportation becoming his subjects. By 1926 Fiene had attracted the dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who gave him a one-man exhibition that year, which travelled to the Boston Arts Club. C.W. Kraushaar Galleries gave Fiene a one-man exhibition of urban, landscape, portrait, and still life paintings in 1927. Julianna Force, the director of the Whitney Studio Club and first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, included two of Fiene's paintings in a fall exhibition in 1928. The Whitney Studio Club showed Fiene's paintings in a two-man exhibition with Glenn O. Coleman that year and acquired three of Fiene's paintings. Also in 1928 Fiene became affiliated with Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery where he had an exhibition of 20 lithographs in the spring. Fiene sold his house in Woodstock in 1928 to spend more of his time in New York City. With so many successful exhibitions, Fiene returned to Paris in 1928-29 where he rented Jules Pascin's studio and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In France, Fiene painted both landscape and urban subjects developed from ideas influenced by Cubist geometry and the use of flat areas of broad color. Upon returning to New York in 1930, Fiene used this new approach to continue to paint New York skyscraper and waterfront subjects, as well as to begin a series of paintings on changing old New York based on the excavations for Radio City Music Hall and the construction of the Empire State Building. Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries exhibited this series, titled "Changing Old New York," in 1931. Fiene also has solo exhibitions at Rehn Galleries in 1930 and 1932. Fiene's oil paintings are exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930 as well. Fiene was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans in December of 1931. Visiting New York, Henri Matisse saw the exhibition and called Fiene's Razing Buildings, West 49th Street the finest painting he had seen in New York. Fiene had two mural studies from his Mechanical Progress series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers in 1932. Fiene sent View from my Window which depicts Fiene working on a lithograph stone while looking out his window to the newly completed Empire State Building to the Carnegie International in 1931. In 1932 Fiene participated in the first Biennial of American Painting at the Whitney Museum and his prints were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Wehye Gallery. In the same year, Fiene was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to further study mural painting in Florence, Italy. On his return from Italy in 1933 Fiene re-engaged himself in New York City life and won several public and private mural projects. Fiene resumed his active exhibition schedule, participating in two group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and a one-man exhibition of recent paintings at the Downtown Gallery in January 1934. In 1933 he purchased a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, which added Connecticut scenes to his landscape subjects. This was also the year Fiene began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine, where he painted seascapes, harbor scenes, and still lifes. Fiene's landscape paintings attracted numerous commissions as part of the American Scene movement. From 1935-36 Fiene took an extended sketching trip through the urban, industrial, and farming areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Most of the twenty-four Pennsylvania urban and rural paintings from this trip were featured in an exhibition held at the First National Bank in Pittsburgh in October of 1937 by the Pittsburgh Commission for Industrial Expansion. Fiene said of these works that he formed rhythm, opportunity for space and color, and integrity in the Pennsylvania mill and furnace paintings. Fiene received the silver medal for one of the Pittsburgh paintings...

For the past dozen years or so I’ve focused on bridge elements by selecting portions of bridge structures and painting segments in a realist style. Previous shows at the Billis Gal...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

In Meadow in Drought, Carole Rabe captures the fragile beauty of a New England field under summer stress. This 20 x 20 inch oil on canvas balances abstraction and naturalism with exp...

Summer on the Porch is a luminous 28 x 24 inch oil painting by acclaimed contemporary realist Carole Rabe, celebrated for her ability to elevate everyday moments into poetic visual n...

Mansard Window, Oil on canvas, cityscape Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn Dr. Rowland S. Russell PhD. writes about his experience directly witnessing Greg's practice as a “plein a...

By Hugo Herbeck (1923-2009) This landscape by Hugo Herbeck captures the atmosphere of autumn in the Central Texas Hillcountry. A road in the foreground with a barbed wire fence exten...

Joseph Orr (b. 1949) "The Home Place" Acrylic on Canvas Canvas Size: 9 x 12 Framed Size: approx 12 x 16 Joseph Orr, from Missouri, has been painting profes...

An oil painting of an antique pair of tongs, meant for use during ice fishing. Suspended from a small rope, hanging from a single nail, against a grey backdrop. Brushstrokes can be seen in the gray of the background, but are harder to make out on the subject. Morfis paints in an extremely refined, realist approach. Painting dimensions: 25 x 19 inches Framed dimensions: 30 x 24 x 1.5 inches Available at Grenning Gallery. BIOGRAPHY John Morfis was born in Glen Cove, Long Island in 1976. His humble beginnings made pursuing a career in art difficult and paradoxically necessary. Fixated on making things aesthetically pleasing, John made an extreme departure from his family life when he chose to base his life on art. Surrounded by mechanics, welders, and otherwise trade workers John had a tough time expressing his interest in a world much more utilitarian and much less expressive and impractical. With an extraordinary desire to be an artist and a grant awarded, John was able to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting from the University of Hartford in 1998. While there John studied oil painting under American realist Stephen Brown. John’s first solo show took place in 2007 at the Ellen Traut Collection Gallery in Hartford, CT and was a near sell out. Since then John has had success up and down the northeastern coast of the United States working with various galleries and collectors. His work has also appeared in various group shows at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut. ARTIST STATEMENT Each painting, although a portrait of a tired hand...

An oil painting of the exteriors of a grouping of historic homes, in various colors, on a sunny day. A white picket fence encases a garden in the foreground. Dimensions: 12 x 24 in...

Film noir crime drama painted in a single frame. In narrative art, telling a story in a single image is harder than doing it in episodes. "'That police officer...

A native of New England, Peter Poskas III paints the charming countryside of coastal Maine and Connecticut, featuring rolling his and tranquil vistas and often local animals. Poskas imbues his paintings with a contemporary approach to color and form while remaining rooted in realist stylistic traditions. Poskas earned a BA from Oberlin College...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subject is modernism’s footprint on the outposts of Americana—places typified by harsh artificial light and hard shadows on concrete. The show makes clear that for Young, despite the contemporary art world’s preferences for irony, disjunction, and tongue-in-cheek intellectual gamesmanship, painting is at its best when it attempts to offer an unpretentious accounting of where and how we live our day-to-day lives. The celebrations of urban sprawl offered by artists like Ed Ruscha—who famously took no-nonsense aerial photographs of thirty four LA parking lots in 1967, and created sleek, stripped down paintings of Standard Oil stations—are an obvious point of reference in Young’s work. But Young’s choices seem more personal than Ruscha’s, and his technique is certainly more painterly: His images of gas stations are uneasy amalgamations, cobbled together from his own memories of road trips, photographs, and pure invention, and rendered with a sense of atmosphere and drama seemingly at odds with his use of hard lines and simple geometric shapes. Painters today tend to lean on pastiche, on art-historical mashups and code-switching. This typically results in images with no unified style and no concern for pictorial space, illusionistic or otherwise. For many contemporary painters, the picture plane is simply a flat, delimited arena in which different types of visual syntax collide, floating freely. This is a non-strategy in which artists make an end run around some of the thornier problems of composition, perception, and cognition. Young bucks this trend. He activates every square inch of his canvases, blocking in large passages of negative space with skeins of scruffy countervailing strokes. He is not a fussy painter, nor is he out to prove his own mastery to an audience. Like Edward Hopper, Young tends to eschew a lot of paint’s seductive properties, preferring to create hard edges and large, gently undulating planes of subdued color. He draws the viewer into an unpopulated, uncluttered world with a clear horizon line—but one that is also filled with hiccups, discontinuities, and compromises. In Service in the Rear, for example, a shelter for gas pumps in the foreground—closest to the viewer and, therefore, logically a dominant compositional element—is rendered as a hazy silhouette that flagrantly disobeys the rules of linear perspective. This is intentional: The structure is only important to Young in the way that it draws the viewer’s eye below and past it, to the glowing, low-slung building dominating the lefthand side of the picture. Thus Young shows his talent for creating visual tension and drama—and for sidestepping the viewer’s expectations. Young understands that some might regard his brand of painting as obsolete. He also understands the troubled legacy of modernism, and what the triumph of universal technology has meant for cultures around the globe. Still, for Young, the cold comfort offered by outposts of convenience—gas stations, airports, cheap hotel rooms—is not so easily dismissed. Young shares the strange buoyant optimism of his hero, Jonathan Richman, who, in his early ‘70s proto-punk single, Roadrunner, exults in the simple act of driving past the Stop’n’Shop with the radio on...

American, b. 1949 In his more than three decades as an artist, Nicholas Berger (b. 1949) has created an outstanding body of work that continues to evolve and excite viewers. Best kn...

American, b. 1949 In his more than three decades as an artist, Nicholas Berger (b. 1949) has created an outstanding body of work that continues to evolve and excite viewers. Best kn...

"Still Life with Oranges" is an oil painting featuring hues of bronze, orange, purple, and red. Marc Chatov is inspired by the work of Diego Velasquez, Édouard Manet, William Bouguer...

Nature is my muse. Animals are losing their habitat and they are, at the very least, confronted by or threatened by all of our discards. Though the birds in my paintings are not vict...

Mansard Window, Oil on canvas, cityscape Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn Dr. Rowland S. Russell PhD. writes about his experience directly witnessing Greg's practice as a “plein a...

Nature is my muse. Animals are losing their habitat and they are, at the very least, confronted by or threatened by all of our discards. Though the birds in my paintings are not vict...

oil on canvas, 40"x60" signed on reverse by the artist, Linda Griggs. This striking fine art painting captures the quiet allure of a nighttime swimming pool, glowing against the dark...

An oil painting of a glowing sunset beyond a verdant patch of trees, painted en plein air, in Norway, while Personett was apprenticing at Odd Nerdrum's stu...

Kevin Frank statement: For me, combining the techniques of the ancient Greco-Roman painters with those of the old and new masters help to create unique modern images. As with all enc...

Realm of Flora, Oil on canvas, cityscape, Park Slope

Activity at the West Shore Terminal, the Woolworth Tower rising in the distance. Commuters in late afternoon on a summer day, 1954, take the ferry Westfield to reach Jersey City.

Richard Thomas Scott is inspired by the work of Rembrandt, Andrew Wyeth, and Vermeer. Born in Conyers, Georgia, and now living in Hudson, New Yor...

"Covered Bridge" is contemporary realist plein air painting of a snow scene in Vermont. The water is frozen over, and there are no people. A path leads from the bridge, away from the viewer, and continues off the canvas, letting us imagine... where does this path lead? A hint of fantasy to this realistic portrayal in Jeffersonville, Vermont. Medium: Oil on Aluminum Framed dimensions: 23.5 x 29.5 inches Artist Bio: Rachel Personett was born in Hawaii, but raised in Colorado. Being the daughter of a pilot she has always traveled extensively. She has studied part time at the Savannah College of Art and Design, The Angel Academy...

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the va...

American Diner Americana Series USA by Leading British Urban Landscape Artist. Art measures 24 x 18 inches Frame measure 29 x 23 inches Angela Wakefie...

This painting is a collaboration with artist Jack Balas. Jack is Wes Hempel's partner. A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict o...

This piece, "Fishing on Round Lake", is an 11x14 landscape oil painting on canvas by artist James Jahrsdoerfer. Featured is an afternoon view onto a...

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the validity of the canon, paintings of the old masters on the walls of museums like the Met, the Louvre, Rijks museum still have a certain cache. They're revered not just for their technique but because they enshrine our collective past experience. Of course, it's a selected past that gets validated. Conspicuously absent to me as a gay man...

“Winter Landscape with Cabin” is a snow scene landscape painting by William Thrasher executed in oil on canvas; measuring 18 x 24 inches. The piece has a silver-painted frame adorned...